"George Bush is, 'I know what's right, and I know what's wrong,' regardless of the nature of reality," said Jonathan Winer, Kerry's counsel from 1983 to 1994. "John takes the opposite approach: 'Don't assume you know where I am. Don't assume I know what I think. We'll talk it through.' It's a deliberate suspension."

Britain and the United States are planning an exercise to combat a simultaneous terror attack in both countries, a scenario ministers says their security services believe is a real possibility.

Blunkett had also been due to meet Attorney General John Ashcroft for talks on tackling organized crime and how London and Washington can work together to shut down illegal internet pornography sites.

Buffett notes that the "cemetery for seers has a huge section set aside for macro forecasters"

The diplomats' assessment comes about half way through the probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency and western intelligence services into the Khan network, whose tentacles extended from Pakistan to Dubai, Malaysia, South Korea (news - web sites), Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Britain, the Netherlands and beyond with potential ties to Syria, Turkey and Spain.
"In all cases except Pakistan, we are sure there was no government involvement," he said. "In Pakistan, it's hard to believe all this happened under their noses and nobody knew about it."

A possible suspect is Syria, which denies nuclear weapons ambitions. U.S. officials are divided on whether Syria constitutes a nuclear threat, with Undersecretary of State John Bolton at odds with senior intelligence officials who insist there's no clear evidence implicating the country, diplomats told AP.

An award-winning Knight Ridder investigative team is hardly resting on its laurels. In an article distributed Wednesday, Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott produced an uncompromising look at Bush administration claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida -- one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive war.
Their surprisingly frank conclusion: the Bush claim "appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons."

Obfuscating the "Israeli motive" of the war was almost certainly one of the reasons the administration so transparently exaggerated first Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and, more recently, Washington's desire for democracy in Iraq.

"Israel has located itself very strategically right in the center of the global arms industry. Israel's sophisticated military hardware and military software are very important to weapons development in the United States. Israel has also become the main subcontractor of American arms. Just last year, Israel signed a contract to train and equip the Chinese army. It signed another multi-billion dollar contract to train and equip the Indian army. What is it equipping them with? It is equipping them with American weapons.

"Israel is very important, because on the one hand it is a very sophisticated, high-tech arms developer and dealer. But on the other hand, there are no ethical or moral constraints: there is no Congress, there are no human rights concerns, there are no laws against taking bribes -- the Israeli government can do anything it wants to. So you have a very sophisticated rogue state -- not a Libyan rogue state, but a high tech, military-expert rogue state. Now that is tremendously useful, both for Europe and for the United States."